In the Drawing Room at Adena, just after it was completed, Worthington held a meeting with Tecumseh and other Indian leaders. It was an effort to secure peace and respect between the races; and much was at stake. Historian Roger Kennedy tells the story:

All the ironies of the relationship between the founders and the Indians came together in this room in 1807. Equals were dealing with equals, and in fact, so conscious of their equalness that the Indians made jokes about the coffee being distributed to them, pretending that they were savages, which they were not. They in fact spent a whole week around here, living with the Worthingtons, and celebrating their common presence in the midst of a deep antiquity – to which the Worthingtons were visitors, and the Indians were not.